Evaluation of Italian Companies' Perception About ISO 14001 and Eco Management and Audit Scheme III: Motivations, Benefits and Barriers

Abstract

In recent decades the adoption of Environmental Management Systems, as frameworks for integrating corporate environmental protection policies and programs, started to become a growing practice among both domestic and multinational companies around the world. Therefore this research wants to present the results of an empirical survey carried out among Italian companies which are certified with the Environmental Management System ISO 14001 and the European Eco Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS). The aim is to identify the type of companies that have implemented an EMS standard, to examine the motivations that have prompted them to introduce it, to state the benefits and barriers perceived and to evaluate differences and similarities between these two systems. The research was carried out through a questionnaire proposed to 1657 certified organizations and 190 companies participated. The Analysis of Variance; chi-test (χ2 test) and Pearson's correlation were used to analyze the items of motivations, benefits and barriers. The results of the survey show that EMAS certification seems to be strictly correlated to ISO 14001; in fact the majority of companies which operate in International markets have both standards; moreover companies of larger size opened up primarily to certification compared to those of smaller size and are prompted to certification for different reasons. Time also is a relevant discriminating factor. As for the analysis of perceived benefits and barriers, this showed an important relation of similarity between ISO 14001 and EMAS. The research gave the contribution on how to manage effectively the firm attention to environmental issues.

Introduction

In the early seventies, because of the sudden oil crisis the theme of sustainability has gained high social importance. The Institute of Supply Management (ISM) defines sustainability as “the Triple Bottom Line – the integration of social, environmental, and economic objectives” (ISM, 2008).

As for environmental sustainability, the first steps were made in the 1970s, when in Europe state and regional programs, laws on air and water pollution protection, waste disposal and protection of nature were approved. In these years both in Britain (1972) and Germany (1976), a comprehensive legislation on protected natural areas, had been developed. Even in Italy it can be seen the signs of this growing sensitivity in 1975, when for the first time the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Environment was established and an year later the Merli law on the regulation of water discharges was implemented, while in 1979 the Inter-Ministerial Committee for the Environment (CIPA) was born. But it is in the 90s that the environmental sensitivity makes a qualitative leap and the environment becomes a global issue. The watershed is the Summit on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, in which the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biodiversity, the Declaration on Forests and the Agenda 21 were approved: these are the cornerstones of the “change of course” towards the development of environmental sustainability. Always in 1992 environmental sustainability comes in Europe, with the Maastricht Treaty and the fifth European Environmental Action Program (Accredia, 2016).

This orientation of international politics has gathered definitely a growing awareness on these environmental sustainability issues, and it also has a stimulant role, and a strong impact in the creation of a new demand for more environmentally friendly goods and services.

This is the context which gave rise to a real generation of environmental certifications; since in the last decades, sustainability had drawn a lot of attention. All the companies that wanted to remain competitive in the global market increasingly adopted Environmental Management Systems (EMS). An EMS is a systematic process that corporations and other organizations use in order to implement environmental goals, policies and responsibilities, as well as regular auditing of its elements (Cascio, 1996). EMSs are based normally on international or regional models of reference: the most widely used are the international ISO 14001 standard and the European Eco Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS). Since its introduction in 1996, the ISO 14001 standard has become a reference model in the field of environmental management. With 324,148 certified organizations in the world in 2014, this standard seems to be garnering the same success as the referential ISO 9001 standard, which is already adopted by over 1,100,000 organizations (International Organization for Standardization, 2014). The Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS), was born three years before ISO 14001, but compared to this standard is primarily used in Europe, actually in 11,692 sites and 3822 organizations (European Commission, 2016). Moreover with the introduction of EMAS III that came into effect on January 2010 the scheme allows Member States to enable EMAS registration for organizations from outside the European Union (EMAS Global) (http://ec.europa.eu/environment/emas).

There is a great deal of theoretical literature available regarding the sources of motivation that lead companies to implement different self-regulation initiatives in their organizations, such as the ISO 14001 standard or the EMAS III. Some studies stress the fact that sources of motivation of an external nature are the ones that lead companies to implement an EMS (Bansal and Roth, 2000, Chan and Wong, 2006, Corbett and Kirsch, 2001, Shin, 2005, Uchida and Ferraro, 2007). The alternative theory consequently focuses on explaining the sources of motivation that lead companies to implement self-regulation mechanisms from an internal perspective (Heras-Saizarbitoria and Landin, 2011, King et al., 2005, Neumayer and Perkins, 2005). Furthermore there is a great deal of literature which considers the benefits (Boiral and Henri, 2012, Kostic et al., 2013, Ratiu and Mortan, 2014) and barriers (Boiral and Henri, 2012, Heras-Saizarbitoria and Landin, 2011) perceived from the implementation of an EMS.

However, there are no studies that consider together both ISO 14001 and EMAS III EMS standards in the Italian context, in order to analyze if they are perceived as different or substitutable ones. Thereby the research tries to cover the literary gap about the effectiveness of the joint use of these two standards, continuing and developing the research line on motivation, benefits and barriers perceived by companies which implement EMSs. In particular, it has been used the term perception concerning the evaluation of the experience of Italian companies deriving from their internal implementation of EMSs. Size and time of certification are used as a discriminating factor in order to understand similarities and differences among those companies integrating and developing the works of Biondi et al. (2000), and Neugebauer (2012).

This study starts following the lines of other studies in Italian context which investigated the performance of EMSs; in detail the research of Daddi et al. (2011), which considered how the EMAS scheme could improve the environmental performance of Italian organizations and the study of Salomone (2008) which explored the connection between EMS and Quality, Occupational Health and Safety, and even Social Responsibility management systems. This research has the aim to analyze together the ISO 14001 and EMAS III EMSs in order to consider not only what are the advantages and disadvantages of implementing them separately, but also to develop them together in an organization, and also what are the type of motivations which had led Italian companies to implement both of them together.

Therefore the research:

• makes a comparison between EMAS III and ISO 14001 standards as for the motivations, benefits and barriers perceived by Italian certified organizations;

• investigates if the company size or the years of certifications are factors that influence the perception of EMS standards;

• correlates the items (motivations, benefits, barriers) of companies with both certifications.

The target is to figure out if both standards can be adopted to achieve a greater advantage, so that managers can obtain recommendations on how to manage effectively the firm attention to environmental issues.